![]() It was this destination that Jimmy Buffett and Bono were headed to that warm day in 1996.īuffett had been an island hopper most of his adult life and had come to know Blackwell early on in his career. After Ian passed away, Chris bought back Goldeneye from the Fleming estate. In the 1950s, James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, purchased the place from Blackwell’s mother and christened it “Goldeneye.” Many of the Bond books were written on this fabled property. It was while luxuriating at this sprawling compound that Bono scribbled down an idea for a new song, “Two Hearts Beat As One.”īlackwell’s estate is located on the west end of the island. On August 21, 1982, when Bono married his high school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, in Ireland, the newlyweds honeymooned at Blackwell’s huge estate in Jamaica. Soon other reggae acts jumped aboard, and Blackwell helped fund the landmark Jamaican film, “The Harder They Come.” Over the next two decades, Island Records’ roster grew to include musicians like Melissa Etheridge, Steve Winwood, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, Grace Jones, and U2. Bob Marley and the Wailers went on to be Island Records flagship group. He soon set up a record label named Island and signed a local musician and his band. ![]() Born into a wealthy landowner’s family, he had immersed himself in the island’s music scene early in the 1970s. Blackwell was inarguably Jamaica’s most renowned entrepreneur. Christopher medal was with Jimmy on the afternoon of January 16, 1996.īoth he and Bono had been guests of Chris Blackwell that week. “Somebody was looking after me – either St. Christopher’s medal had been in the cockpit, and later, Buffett went back to retrieve it. Shaken and bruised, he managed to swim to a nearby passing boat that, in turn, took him to the mainland for medical attention. Seconds after take-off, Buffett’s plane dropped 30 feet back into the ocean. Water had seeped into the compartment, causing an uneven distribution of weight. Authorities later speculated that one of the craft’s pontoon runners had a crack in it. Having finished with the day’s catch, Jimmy fired up his nearby Grumman twin-engine airplane, ready to head home. Two years earlier, on August 25, 1994, Jimmy was fishing with a friend in Madaket Harbor off Nantucket, Massachusetts. Buffett had once crashed one of his planes. He sang, “It’s the sound of the low tide/The smell of the rain/Travelin’ alone/On my boat and my plane/Take it all in, it’s as big as it seems/Count all your blessings/Remember your dreams.” The blessings the song alluded to were in answer to the fact that Mr. Jimmy had been flying for over a decade, having learned on a single-engine Lake Renegade craft he’d dubbed “Lady of The Waters.” He’d once written a song, “Jimmy Dreams,” in response to an incident with one of his planes. The laid-back, reefer-rapscallion, whose cottage industry of tropical ditties had beckoned legions of middle managers to don Parrot Head caps and drink massive amounts of fruity concoctions, was in the cockpit of his big sea plane steering a course to the west end of the island. On that particular sunny afternoon of January 16, 1996, Bono was riding in a plane owned and operated by one Jimmy Buffett. It was instead an allusion to what befell him and his family when they touched down in the tiny island nation of Jamaica shortly afterward. But Bono’s comment to his friends wasn’t directed towards this symbolic, peaceful visit to a country climbing out of the rubble of its self-destruction. The siege on Sarajevo had claimed approximately 10,000 lives during the recent Bosnian conflict. He and his wife celebrated the New Year of 1996 checking out the underground rock scene in that town’s crumbling clubs. ![]() A few weeks earlier, he had been in Sarajevo, staying at the former Yugoslavian Olympic city’s war-torn Holiday Inn. “I honestly thought we were all going to die,” Bono, lead singer of the Irish band of conscience, U2, told friends one January night. JanuBuffett, Blackwell, and Bono: Bullet the Blue Sky
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